Host Elias Makos dropped the first hint of the cancellation during last week’s show, describing it as the “penultimate” one. Rogers confirmed to me today that it has decided to end the show. It sent me this statement:

Rogers Media is evolving its local strategy to better serve the Montreal community. In doing this we’re deepening our commitment to local news with the launch of daily newscast CityNews in Winter 2018. As a result of this re-focused strategy, SN Central will have its last broadcast this Thursday, August 31 at 6:30 p.m. We’d like to thank Elias Makos and all of our contributors for their smart and entertaining commentary on Montreal’s sports scene.

City will continue to provide coverage of Montreal sports teams and events on Breakfast Television, featuring Joanne Vrakas, Derick Fage, Catherine Verdon Diamond, Elias Makos and Domenic Fazioli as well as through our new CityNews newscast, launching Winter 2018.

Makos remains with City, as the new media producer and occasional fill-in host or weather presenter on Breakfast Television.

The last show will be broadcast mere hours before the condition of licence requiring the station to broadcast the show expires. As of Sept. 1, City Montreal (CJNT-DT) has standard conditions of licence regarding local programming.

The cancellation of the show makes sense since the new evening newscasts would take over all three of its timeslots. But that won’t happen until next winter.

I was worried that it had been cancelled or something, because normally it starts earlier in the summer, but CBC has finally opened the curtain on its yearly Absolutely Quebec series of regional specials.

As in previous years, the series of six one-hour episodes, produced by Carrie Haber, runs Saturdays at 7pm, each hour a different documentary based in Quebec.

The first, called Cities Held Hostage, stars former Montreal Gazette columnist Henry Aubin and discusses the very topical issue of real estate and housing prices in an urban environment. While Montreal hasn’t gone insane like Vancouver and Toronto, it is part of a system, and this documentary explores that system.

The remaining documentaries are as follows:

The Gardener (Sept. 2): A documentary reflecting on a spiritual and creative approach to gardening. A highly experiential program profiling one of Quebec’s prolific landscape artists, Frank Cabot.

Napagunnaqullusi — So that you can stand (Sept. 9): The story of the 11 Inuit signatories of the James Bay Agreement as they took on the Quebec government to protect their land and their children’s future in the early 1970s.

I’m Still Your child (Sept. 16): Jessy, Sarah and Von are all familiar with the “ups and downs” of living with a parent who suffers from mental illness. I’m Still Your Child immerses us in a bewildering, yet hopeful, world through the stories of three compelling subjects.

The channels, one each in French and English, were set to launch that fall.

They didn’t.

I sat down with Gagné at the Gazette restaurant in Old Montreal (which was named after the newspaper I work for and is in the building it once occupied). We had a long chat, about how he couldn’t understand the decision by Corus to pull the plug on the Dusk channel (formerly Scream TV), how the financial information it disclosed to the CRTC showed it to be healthy, and how the data he’s seen on video-on-demand consumption of horror films makes such a channel a no-brainer.

But I never ended up writing the article, and the channel never launched. Until now.

After signing a distribution deal with Videotron, Frissons TV (in French only for now) will launch on Sept. 1, with a free preview for Videotron customers until Nov. 18.

I spoke to Gagné again, and wrote about what to expect from the channel in this story at Cartt.ca. For those without a Cartt subscription, here are the details to know:

The channel will be commercial-free (Gagné said it makes no financial sense to put in the effort to sell ads that people won’t want to see anyway).

The channel will be available in HD only on Videotron, Channel 799.

After the free preview, the channel will be available on Videotron’s custom packages, and will be added to the Mega package that has all the non-premium channels. It will also be available individually as of December for $5 a month.

Videotron will have some of Frissons TV’s content available on demand for subscribers.

Negotiations are continuing with other providers, particularly Bell. Videotron is the launch provider but the channel will be available to others in October. There hasn’t been much effort to sell the channel to non-Quebec providers like Rogers.

An English version of the channel is in the future plans, but only once the French version gets off the ground.

At the CRTC

The government order requiring the CRTC to reconsider its TV licence renewal decisions has been posted. It asks the commission to consider, for the French-language decisions, “how it can be ensured that significant contributions are made to the creation and presentation of original French-language programming and music programming,” and for the English-language ones, “how it can be ensured that significant contributions are made to the creation and presentation of programs of national interest, music programming, short films and short-form documentaries,” and “take into consideration that creators of Canadian programming are key to the Canadian broadcasting system and that, while the industry is going through a transformation, Canadian programming and a dynamic creative sector are vital to the system’s competitiveness and contribute to Canada’s economy.” Nothing specific, but it does bring into question decisions related to quotas for programs of national interest, the elimination of special requirements for contributions to the BravoFACT and MuchFACT production funds by Bravo and Much, respectively, and to the Remstar Fund by MusiquePlus and MAX.

CJSO-FM 101,7 Sorel has had its licence renewed for two years. The station failed to install a public alerting system before the deadline and failed to provide proper program logs. In addition to the short-term renewal for repeated non-compliance, the station is being required to broadcast a message announcing its compliance failure to its audience.

Another station getting a licence renewal is CKBK-FM Thamesville, Ont. This despite failure to file annual reports and the fact that it failed to respond to the CRTC’s requests for information about that issue.

Shaw has gotten a temporary exception from the CRTC about how it distributes TV channels. Shaw had complained about a rule setting a quota on how many independent services to distribute related to the number of related (i.e. Shaw- or Corus-owned) channels. Because there’s a change in categories of specialty channels (which become “discretionary” channels because they no longer have to be specialized), Shaw would be technically in non-compliance as of Sept. 1 for one year. Shaw gets an exception to the rule, but can’t use it to drop independent channels it’s already carrying.

RDI’s fall schedule includes adding a second hour to political has-been show Les Ex, from 4-5pm. The second hour will end with a who-won-the-political-day segment, the epitome of horse-race journalism. Among the documentaries being aired is Québec, my country mon pays, this Friday at 8pm.

Radio

The Jewel 106.7 has a new home, in Plaza Pointe-Claire near St-Jean Blvd. and Highway 20. It stresses that it remains committed to serving off-island communities despite moving away from them, but this reinforces the fact that it sees its big market as the West Island, even though it told the CRTC that Hudson/St-Lazare sees itself as separate from Montreal.

Canadaland has a guest opinion piece by Nick Fillmore about the issues he has with CBC Radio. It’s a bit harsh, but it makes the point that personal “storytelling” shows of late are taking the place of big-issue shows. I think personal storytelling has its place, but there seems to have been a surge in the number of interview shows where first-person stories are taking the place of journalism and documentary of old, mainly because it’s cheaper to produce.

Other

Quebecor is bailing out the Cinéma Impérial, which otherwise likely would have been crushed by its own debt. In exchange for taking over its mortgage debt, Quebecor gets two seats on a six-seat board, with the Losique family having two and the two others to be independent. Meanwhile, the neverending trainwreck that is the Montreal World Film Festival continues with Serge Losique at the helm, and the Cinéma Impérial acting as the only theatre.

News about people

Susan Krashinsky, now Susan Krashinsky Robertson, is the Globe and Mail’s new media reporter, adding the beat to her existing advertising and marketing coverage. Krashinsky Robertson had previously been the media beat reporter from 2010 to 2012, replaced by Steve Ladurantaye, who was replaced by James Bradshaw when Ladurantaye left for Twitter. Bradshaw was recently moved to the banks beat.

News about news

The news out of Charlottesville, Va., where a move to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee was met with protests by right-wing, extreme-right-wing and white-supremacist activists, and counter-protests by left-wingers, has caused chaos not only for the U.S. president and politicians, but right-wing media in Canada as well. Ezra Levant, the supreme commander at The Rebel, wrote a memo disassociating himself with the “alt-right” over this, believing the group had gone too far. But even that wasn’t enough for several contributors who decided to leave this week:

Brian Lilley, Levant’s former colleague at the Sun News Network, announced his departure from The Rebel on Monday. Levant, classy guy that he is, suggested Lilley was being pressured by Bell Media and others (Lilley has a show on Bell’s Ottawa talk radio station), which Lilley said was not the case. Lilley’s interview with As It Happens suggests the two didn’t part on good terms.

At the CRTC

The federal government has decided to ask the CRTC to review its licence renewal decisions for major commercial TV broadcasters — Bell Media, Corus, Rogers, Quebecor and V. At issue are two elements of those decisions that have become controversial: standardizing a special quota called “programs of national interest” (defined as long-form documentary, drama, scripted comedy and specific Canadian award shows that celebrate Canadian creative talent) at the lowest minimum the English groups had, and eliminating a special requirement for Corus’s Séries+ and Historia that required expenditures on original first-run French-language content. The actual order hasn’t been posted yet, so Joly’s tweet is actually the most detailed thing we have to go on right now.

TV

The CRTC has approved Rogers’s request to pull the licence for G4, formerly G4techTV. News of the channel’s demise came out last month, but the letter from Rogers confirms the station will shut down Aug. 31 and they don’t plan to just rebrand it as something else. The American G4 was shut down in 2014. G4 in Canada been operating as a zombie channel for a while now.

Bell Media’s French specialty channels — Vie, D, Investigation, Vrak and Z — are all on free preview until Sept. 18, on Videotron, Cogeco and Bell, and probably others.

The Rogers Cup semifinal match featuring Canadian Denis Shapovalov was a hit for both Sportsnet and TVA Sports, which had about half a million each on average, and a peak above 700,000 each. For both, it was the most watched tennis match ever.

Jay and Dan, or rather “SC WITH JAY AND DAN PRESENTED BY TIM HORTONS”, will start Sept. 4 at midnight. Be warned, “the Tim Hortons sponsorship also includes custom product onset integrations”

Sportsnet 650 in Vancouver has announced its play-by-play team for Vancouver Canucks broadcasts: Brendan Batchelor and Corey Hirsch. Batchelor had previously done play-by-play for the WHL’s Vancouver Giants, and Hirsch was part of the national Sportsnet NHL team on TV. The station launches Sept. 4.

Online

News about people

Tina Tenneriello, who recently filled in for Joanne Vrakas at Breakfast Television, has been hired at City Montreal. But it’s not as Vrakas’s maternity leave replacement. Rather, she’s been added to the roster of video journalists for the new local evening newscasts set to begin in 2018. Until she starts here she’s training and working for City nationally, including for the Edmonton and Winnipeg newscasts starting next month. Cora MacDonald, who like Tenneriello cut her teeth reporting at CJAD, was hired earlier for the team.

The Athletic, a website operating in several cities staffed with writers who have either left or been laid off from jobs at newspapers and other publications, is coming to Montreal.

Arpon Basu, frequent local sports commentator and until last month managing editor of the NHL’s French website LNH.com, announced today he’s been hired as the editor-in-chief of both the French and English versions of the Montreal section of the website.

His first post for the website is short on details about the future but has perspective on Basu’s career up until now. (Among his previous gigs was writing amateur athlete profiles for the Montreal Gazette on a freelance basis.)

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Cult MTL as the newspaper celebrates its fifth anniversary is how little has changed since it first launched a monthly print edition.

There has been a tightening of the editorial focus, and some experiments that didn’t work out (including a short-lived biweekly publishing schedule), but mostly the publication has stayed true to its purpose: An alternative source for information about local arts and culture for a young audience.

Born out of the ashes of the Montreal Mirror, unceremoniously shut down by owner Quebecor Media in June 2012, Cult MTL began as an online outlet, then a monthly print newspaper very similar to its spiritual (but in no way legal) predecessor. Several of its contributors, including editor-in-chief Lorraine Carpenter, were Mirror employees. Regular Mirror features such as the Best of Montreal readers’ poll and the Rant Line resurfaced.

“I feel that we’re somewhat established as a brand, but it happens fairly frequently that we come across people who have never heard of us,” Carpenter told me in an interview on Friday, noting that the Mirror had 27 years to build its brand (and most of that in an age before the Internet vastly increased the number of news sources). “We still feel pretty fresh in a sense, but a lot of people do know us. One of our continuing challenges is getting the next generation to come to us online and in print as well. That’s why every year we put out the student survival guide and appeal to students.”

Five years in, the paper’s financial situation has stabilized, and its revenues are slowly growing. “We’ve had, especially this year, quite an increase in business,” Carpenter said. “It’s pretty much all local companies with a few exceptions that have been showing us a lot of support.”

She said local cultural institutions, who were hesitant during the first years, are now on board with ad support. “You can see that in the size of our issues this year compared to just last year or two years ago.”

They’re not exactly rolling in the cash, though. Freelance rates are still very low, at $25 to $50 a story, which Carpenter acknowledges isn’t enough. “We’re hoping to raise our rates soon,” she said.

The paid staff is small, with five or six people, working a mix of full-time and part-time hours. There are about a dozen regular freelancers, and many more who contribute rarely or only once.

Pitch me

Carpenter said she’d like to see more. “We don’t get nearly enough pitches from people,” she said. And it’s not because they’re not interested. They get plenty of CVs and proposals to write for them, but “they don’t actually pitch, they just want to be hired and given assignments.”

So if you got an idea for some artistic event you’d like to preview, some artist you’d like to interview, or some aspect of culture you’d like to write about, they’re all ears.

I asked Carpenter what kind of stories she likes to see pitched to her. “We like to preview events that are coming up in the city,” she said. “We like to include interviews. We don’t generally do these rehashed press-release-type articles or a flimsy photo with a few words. Something a little more substantial.”

Once a month is enough

In 2013, as Cult celebrated its first anniversary, it tried going biweekly during the summer, hoping to double ad revenue. But advertisers, most of whom had fixed budgets, couldn’t just double their buys because the newspaper was printing more often.

“In the beginning, for the first six months of Cult MTL, no one was getting paid,” Carpenter explained. “So just through the advertising money that was coming in, we technically had enough money to print twice a month, but then when we started paying people we were just getting into the red.”

So they went back to a monthly schedule. Now they print 11 issues a year, at the beginning of every month except January.

Which is fine by them. “We’ve never had the goal of going weekly, doing what the Mirror used to do,” Carpenter said.

Unlike the Mirror, Cult’s website is very active, with a lot of content that never makes it into the print edition. Stuff that’s more newsy generally ends up there, rather than waiting up to a month for the next print edition.

Motivation

I asked Carpenter if the motivation has worn off after five years of hard work. She said no.

“I was at the Mirror for a really long time, 12 years or so,” she said, noting that it was only at the very end that she was an editor with some decision-making power. “Being able to be at the helm of something, I definitely don’t have any trouble staying motivated. My motivation now is the same as when we just started. It’s to give something to support the local cultural scene.”

Fortunately for Carpenter, she no longer has to personally distribute the paper, as she did in its first few months, loading a van every month and bringing copies to dozens of locations. They’ve hired a team of people to distribute the paper for them, despite offers from professionals (notably Diffumag, which distributes Voir) to take them on as clients.

I asked Carpenter about what she’s learned after five years, what advice she could give a 2012 version of herself.

“In the early days we were definitely overextending ourselves trying to do too much stuff, trying to appeal to too many groups at the same time,” she said. “There was a phase where I found some of the stuff we were putting online was too clickbaity.”

Demographics

Like The Mirror and others, Cult’s main selling point is the audience it can reach: young, hip urbanites. Though Carpenter said they have a mix of readers, and the responses to the Best of Montreal polls made that clear.

“You can tell it’s the same people in their 40s and 50s who have been filling out the same form for the Mirror for years,” she said, but there were also answers, particularly in the nightlife section, that showed a different crop of younger people.

Changes in media technology have meant doing things that the Mirror never had to worry about. Like maintain a Facebook page and use it to engage readers.

“We’ve had to learn how to write headlines and excerpts for Facebook,” Carpenter said, to make people want to read stories without resorting to the clickbait gimmicks. Instead, they want to “get our message across: This is what this is.”

The future

So what’s in store for the next five years? Probably more of the same, but better. A website redesign is coming “soon”, Carpenter said. As revenue increases, they want to start paying freelancers better, and eventually add to their staff. “It’s always been my goal to expand our editorial team,” she said. “It would be nice to have an extra person.”

But as far as the content is concerned, it’s still going to fulfill its mandate: to inform readers about what’s going on in the soul of this city.

The other group that was left empty-handed in the urban Indigenous radio station proceeding is also appealing the result. VMS Media argues that CRTC commissioner Linda Vennard, who sat on the panel for the proceeding, was in a conflict of interest because she accepted gifts from an ethnic broadcaster that the commission argued would be negatively affected by VMS’s proposal for a hybrid ethnic-Indigenous format. Vennard had already been found in a conflict for those gifts in an unrelated proceeding.

Ottawa has announced rules related to the sale of 600 MHz spectrum that’s being taken from the over-the-air television UHF band. They include set-asides that will benefit Videotron, Shaw and anyone else who’s not the Big Three. The rules also state that affected television stations won’t be required to change channels until whoever buys a licence for the spectrum in question is ready to build its infrastructure and start using it.

Radio

Rouge FM’s new logo

Rouge FM has announced (or, perhaps, just re-announced) its lineup of mainly personalities moved over from Énergie, including Dominic Arpin and Mélanie Maynard in the morning and Éric Salvail and his billion contributors in the afternoon. They start Aug. 14. The network of stations has also adopted a new logo, with a fat lowercase “rouge” and smaller uppercase “FM” in superscript, replacing the older semi-cursive logo.

Employees at the Halifax Chronicle Herald, who have been on strike for 18 months, look like they could be heading back to work finally, with news of a deal in principle with the union. The deal must be ratified by employees before the strike ends.

Jobs

Amanda Stein, sports reporter at TSN Radio 690, used her famously impeccable handwriting to deliver news she’s been teasing for a bit: She’s leaving the station next month, moving to New Jersey and going to work for the Devils.

Her last day on air in Montreal will be Friday, Aug. 18.

My Announcement…After 7 years at TSN I have decided to move on… My letter, written the only way I know how: pic.twitter.com/lG4SGXxx6i

Stein is one of several young women to get their broadcasting start reporting for Montreal’s all-sports station, a list that includes Andie Bennett (now at CBC), Jessica Rusnak (now filling in for Bennett’s mat leave) and Robyn Flynn. If TSN is going to hire someone to replace Stein, Rusnak would be an obvious choice.

The Canadian Press news service has joined the National NewsMedia Council, a national press council that replaces regional councils in B.C., Manitoba, Ontario and Atlantic Canada (but not Quebec). It’s the first time CP has joined such a council, and gives it significant standing as a respectable body that people can appeal to when they have issues with coverage. Other members of the NNC include the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Postmedia newspapers, Winnipeg Free Press, Victoria Times Colonist, Maclean’s, Glacier Media, TC Media and Brunswick News, representing most of Canada’s English-language dailies.

Le Soleil, Le Devoir and La Presse have won an injunction in court to prevent the political news website La Dose from publishing excerpts of their stories online. The newspapers argued that La Dose is profiting financially from including headlines and lead paragraphs of news stories, even though they link to the original stories on those papers’ websites. Depending how the case goes, it could set a precedent for aggregators. La Dose is appealing the injunction.

Bell is trying again to get the commission to rescind its decision to eliminate simultaneous substitution during the Super Bowl. Its application lays out real-world consequences of the action, that went into effect with the last Super Bowl in February: A 40% audience drop and $11 million in lost revenue compared to the previous year, which means $3.3 million less in funding for Canadian programming. It also argues that the decision goes against the objectives of the Broadcasting Act and even Canada’s trade agreements with the United States. And it confusingly takes the position that Canadians don’t care about U.S. ads even though 40% of Canadians decided to watch them. Finally, it promises to air a program of curated U.S. Super Bowl ads on CTV before the game, and launch a public awareness campaign, if the CRTC agrees to reverse the decision.

The CRTC has approved two more AM-to-FM conversions for CBC Radio One transmitters: Lebel-sur-Quévillon and Senneterre. The conversions will leave only two AM CBC transmitters in Quebec: CBMD Chapais (a retransmitter of CBVE-FM Quebec) and CBOM Maniwaki (a retransmitter of CBO-FM Ottawa).

The CRTC is giving another two and a half months for people to submit proposals for national ethnic television services to replace OMNI. OMNI is being given three years of mandatory distribution (and subscriber fees of $0.12 per subscriber per month) starting Sept. 1, but if another broadcaster can do better, they can propose to replace OMNI as of 2020. The new deadline for applications is Nov. 6, 2017.

Rogers has announced the news teams for CityNews in Winnipeg and Edmonton, which both start Sept. 4, drawing heavily on local talent in both markets. CityNews will run without anchors in these cities and in those launching next year: Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal.

Z télé is starting a new series called Comédie sur mesure where a series of comedians go to small towns and perform custom standup performances. Which sounds a lot like CBC’s Still Standing. That’s because the concept is based on a Danish series. The two Canadian versions are being produced by different production companies.

Bloomberg Businessweek devotes a story to the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a company in the U.S. that owns dozens of TV stations and is in the process of acquiring another similar company, which owns among other things Chicago’s WGN. The issue is that Sinclair is using its stations to push a conservative agenda, issuing “must-run” political opinion pieces and showing a disregard for the line between news and advertising.

Discovery Communications has agreed to buy Scripps Networks for $14.6 billion. Discovery, which owns the U.S. versions of Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet and OWN, would buy the owner of Food, HGTV, DIY Network and Cooking Channel. It wouldn’t affect much in Canada, except that shows might promote each others’ networks. Discovery, Animal Planet and related channels in Canada are owned by Bell, while Canadian versions of Food, HGTV, DIY, Cooking and OWN are owned by Corus.

“Because some of you congressmen are faggots yourself! [crowd applauds] Talk to me! You move quick. What it look like? A man dressed like a woman. Trying to share a toilet! Next to your daughter! And his genitalia is not the same! Thus opening the doors to rape! Yes, it is! You congressmen, you congressmen, and preachers that are endorsing. You are pedophiles!”

Radio

Some Bell Media Radio stations have been made available again on the TuneIn app, including CJAD, TSN 690 and CHOM. My random selection of various Bell Media stations suggests that the only ones that are still unavailable are the Virgin Radio stations. It’s still unclear what the issue it. Bell had earlier said that it didn’t ask TuneIn to pull the stations from its app.

Print

Newspaper companies have threatened legal action against LexisNexis because of the way its media monitoring service works. They say LexisNexis’s activities are beyond the scope of their copyright licence, and they want to see more money from them.

YouTube has launched a CanCon channel called YouTube Spotlight Canada, devoted to exposing Canadian YouTube artists to a wider audience. The channel has a bunch of CBC videos, Heritage Minutes, Canada 150 stuff, and music from Canadian artists, including a special spotlight on Indigenous ones.

In this totally unbiased news story, the company behind InHalton.com notes that the Toronto Star complained that its website is confusingly similar to Torstar’s Inside Halton website, and demanding it change its name. InHalton is from the same people that created InSauga and InBrampton, so the confusion was certainly not intentional. But you can kind of see Inside Halton’s point.

The Women’s Tennis Association has launched WTA TV, a subscription streaming service of WTA events. Cost is $100 a year or $13 a month, it’s available everywhere except China, and it doesn’t cover all events (the major tournaments, or some events like the Quebec City one where there are rights issues).

CBC has a 5,000-word story on Ken Pagan, the former Postmedia employee who threw a beer can during a Blue Jays game last fall. While it goes into lots of detail about what a not-awful person he is, it doesn’t answer the big questions: He says he doesn’t know why he threw the can, and he can’t say why he no longer works for Postmedia.

Bill Brownstein talks to Mike Paterson, the comedian who was busy performing on a small free outdoor stage during the Just For Laughs festival, and is trying to make a career as an anglo comic in Montreal.